• Mirco Tonin. ‘Pay-What-You-Want to support independent information - A field experiment on motivation.’
Authors: Alessandra Casarico, Mirco Tonin
Abstract: Pay-what-you-want schemes can be a useful tool to finance high quality and independent news media without restricting readership, therefore guaranteeing maximum diffusion. We conduct a field experiment with the Italian information site lavoce.info to explore how to structure a campaign in a way that maximises readers’ willingness to contribute. We compare messages stressing two possible motivations to contribute, namely the public good component of the news or image motivation. We also test the effect of including information about the tax allowance associated with donations. While the particular motivation stressed does not have a significant impact, information about tax allowances surprisingly reduces overall donations, due to a reduction in the number of (small) donors. Stable unsubscriptions from the newsletter suggest that the campaign does not have an adverse effect on readers
• Maria Recalde. ‘Leadership and risk-taking:
A field experiment on the mechanisms underlying social influence.’
Authors: Kate Ambler, Susan Godlonton, Maria Recalde
Abstract: We conduct an artefactual field experiment with 121 social groups in rural Malawi to investigate peer effects in risk-taking and the mechanisms underlying social influence. Treatments vary whether individuals observe the behavior of a formally elected group leader, an external leader, or a randomly selected peer. Within each treatment we also vary the structure of the underlying risk and whether the choice observed by individuals is realized (Bursztyn et al. 2014). Results show that that peers are the most influential agents in our sample, followed by elected leaders and external leaders. Different mechanisms underlie the influence of these agents. Individuals follow their peers because they learn from their actions, while they follow external and elected leaders because they derive other forms of social utility from following their example. Our paper contributes to the literature by distinguishing the mechanisms by which different members of a social group influence others. From a policy perspective, our study suggests that information about peer interest and intentions can be leveraged to encourage social learning and information diffusion in environments where significant barriers for behavior change exist.
• Fernanda Leite Lopez de Leon. ‘Prejudice in the Age of Brexit: A Field-Experiment.’
Authors: Markus Bindemann and Fernanda Leite Lopez de Leon
Abstract: The 2016 EU referendum results, and the Brexit vote, were perceived as a statement against immigration. We conducted a field- experiment in Britain to test this perception and to investigate whether the Brexit vote had triggered negative attitudes and anti-social behaviour towards immigrants. Our (non-deceptive) experimental intervention shifted individuals’ perceptions about the local support for Brexit in the UK. We do not find evidence that the perception of a larger support for Brexit led to a demand for tighter immigration policies. However, in a dictator game, individuals gave less to Europeans and became more likely to express negative views about them. Overall, our results indicate modest impacts of the Brexit vote, but they point to the effect of information revealed in election outcomes in changing citizens’ attitudes.
• John Gibson. ‘Quality, Quantity, and Price: Experimental Evidence on Taxing Soft Drinks.’
Authors: John Gibson and Steven Tucker
Abstract: We conducted laboratory experiments in New Zealand to study how consumers adjust the quality of soft drinks demanded as prices change. We introduce two key features seen in the field: a distribution of prices across space because of transport costs, which alters the relative price of quality; and, consumer responses to price changes that occur on both the quality margin and the quantity margin. Most of the estimates of the price elasticity of quantity demand from observational data that are used to advocate for taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages ignore these two features. Consequently, these studies have overstated the likely reduction in the quantity of sugary drinks that would be consumed if health-related taxes are introduced for these drinks.
Our laboratory experiment with 360 participants was set up to mimic a typical household survey, with participants randomly allocated into one of 36 clusters (`villages’) where prices differed between clusters because of transport costs. Participants made choices over 14 soft drinks (six energy drinks, five colas, three other soft drinks) whose baseline prices range from $2.80 per liter to $11.20 per liter (US$2 to US$8), where this quality variation reflects brand effects, package size effects, and product type effects.
In addition to the between-subject variation we also have within-subject variation from six counterfactual price distributions based on ad valorem and specific taxes of various rates, and also two types of price discounts. We gathered five rounds of data from participants, corresponding to five days of recording in a typical household survey, allowing for a stochastic distribution of daily prices and incomes.
We observe quality downgrading in expensive villages within our lab, in keeping with the patterns seen in the field data. In other words, buying lower quality drinks is one way to cope with higher prices. Counterfactual price rises also cause quality downgrading, while price cuts cause the average quality purchased to rise. If we aggregate across products to consider group-level price elasticities, the own-price elasticity of quantity demand for soft drinks is overstated by about 40% if the response of quality to price is ignored. The nature of our participants and of the drinks that were feasible to use in our economics laboratory make this likely to be a lower bound on the degree of bias.